Special Guest Blogger: Arthur Machen

The First World War was a time when having seen thousands of British soldiers wiped out by machine guns, a million young men thought, that’s the life for me, and volunteered to replace them and the miltary eggheads sent over to France to see what happened this time when they were told to run towards German machine guns.
I was writing supernatural and fantasy fiction publish for literary magazines and had my first major success with 'The Great God Pan' and at the start of the war, as the first battle took place a short distance from Agincourt 500 years earlier, I had an idea for a short story based on the blending of that battle with the one happening today and it was published in the London Evening News and was called 'The Bowmen'.
My story was that under the fields of this corner of Europe lay British soldiers from the campaigns of Edward III and at this key moment in English history, the ghosts of Agincourt rose up from the ground and intervened on the English side but i had written it as a news report which was my style of writing which may have led to the later confusion.
What happened was Bowman work of fiction turned into real life as there were reports that medieval English bowmen had been seen by the soldiers and a St George Cross had appeared in the sky to inspire the English as the so-called ‘Angels of Mons’ conclusively proved that God was on the side of the English against the Germans.
These stories of apparitions and heavenly bodies were widely believed and many soldiers became convinced that they too had seen the angels, and the patriotic value of this divine intervention was so good for morale that it was encouraged by the clergy and the politicians although i did receive requests to provide evidence for the story from readers who thought it was true, to which I responded that it was completely imaginary and a story i had created.
Parish magazine's began asking me for permission to reprint the story and i said they could but to make it perfectly clear it was a made up story and not true but they missed that bit out obviously as it was a boon for the religious business and all this killing of Germans in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, who, unless I’m grossly mistaken, was actually rather keen on tolerance and not murdering each other, but the snowball of rumour that was then set rolling has been rolling ever since, grew bigger and bigger.
By now the story had been embellished to soldiers finding the corpses of German soldiers that had been found on the battlefield with arrow wounds and then the British Spiritualist magazine ran with it as 'proof' with visions of a supernatural force that miraculously intervened to help the British at the decisive moment of the battle.
I tried to put and end to it by republishing the story in book form, with a long preface stating the rumours were false and originated in my story but even with the Society for Psychical Research announcing the stories of Angelic Soldiers was false, the rumours continued  with now even British officers saying they had seen things with one very high ranking Officer, General Charteris , saying he watched as an Angel of the Lord, clad in white raiment bearing a flaming sword, appearing before the German forces at the Mons battle forbidding their advance.
The tales only began to subside once the war was over but forever after i became associated with it and if i had known that i would have written it better because it was something i dashed off quickly because i was only going to get a pittance for it from the Newspaper.